love, critters, and halloween

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on Sunday we rested…on Monday, I melted down

We took Sunday off and instead attended a Labor Day bbq-with-a-twist..namely, the food of the day was grilled pizza. And it was a contest. And Bones won, with a daring attempt at a reuben pizza!

We stayed out a mite late, celebrating his victory with a few rousing tabletop card games, but still managed to get up and to the haunt before Kitty and Dave arrived there. (I assure you, with my exhaustion levels being what they are? This was a victory.)

Dave arrived with tools in hand that allowed him to remove a huge dang trip hazard we’d been struggling with..namely, a row of metal grates that don’t all fit into their drain trough the way they once did. He and Bones continued to figure out a maze layout that would work with our limited space. And I? I had a meltdown over mortar lines.

In the early days of discussing our haunt, Bones stated he wanted to do stone walls.

“Like, um, a castle?” I asked, referencing a haunt from my past.

“Yeeeah. Sorry. But yeah..”

I’ve had a lot of experience painting plywood to make it look like stonework, but it’s a little (read: A LOT) time consuming. We considered making huge stamps. Or stencils. Or…well, let’s look online for more ideas. Or…

We still didn’t have a good answer. But I was leaning towards doing what I knew.

Dave suggested a technique that was new to me, in which you put tape on the wall where you’d like your mortar lines to be, and then you paint over the entire wall using a small roller and a paint pan with three different colours of paint.

After you muck around with the colours, blurring them together and changing the direction of your roller as often as you can, you then remove the tape.

Annnnd I kinda freaked out. I was just too damn tired to think about a whole new idea when I thought we’d already decided on something I was already familiar with doing. (I may also have been suffering from some PTSD, which I’ll describe in my next post.)

Kitty kindly took me out for lumber supplies and for coffee. That helped a lot. I went back to painting walls grey in preparation for them becoming stone, and the others kept on working on the maze. Dave suggested that the car lift – the thing worrying me so much, still – become another anchoring point for the haunt. He and Bones created a sort of wooden collar around one of the arms of the lift, attached it to an adjacent wall, and – voila! – a much more solidly braced wall. (Said collar is down at the bottom of the blue post thingala, by the ladder.)

The man is a dang genius.

Because work beckoned the following day, we didn’t work all that late…although we’re certainly feeling the pressure of ‘wow that maze isn’t done yet we have so much more to do AUGH!!!!’

And Bones started to go from ‘oh, we’ll have walls left over!’ to ‘oh god we need 50 more walls.’